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A modernist master's Mozartean face: Rihm writes for Barto's pianos

Wolfgang Rihm, whose second piano concerto will have its U.S. premiere Thursday at the Kennedy Center, is “an artist of transformations,” conductor Christoph Eschenbach says.

WASHINGTON – He is one of the most played, most popular and most important composers in Europe. In the United States, that makes him, for some people, scary; for others, irrelevant.

But Wolfgang Rihm, the 62-year-old German composer, is not scary, although it's true that his music has a certain intellectual rigor and cachet. Nor is he irrelevant. It's not fair to lump him in with the idea of the thorny European avant-garde. He's perfectly capable of writing music that appeals to a lay audience and is even, shockingly enough, beautiful. Rihm is, it's true, solidly in the German tradition. But while that tradition includes Karlheinz Stockhausen (one of his teachers) and the famous and sometimes dogmatic new-music program in Darmstadt – names that are supposedly off-putting to American orchestral audiences – it also includes Schumann, Brahms and Mozart, and these composers' influence, too, resounds throughout Rihm's scores.

“Schumann plays a big role in Wolfgang's head,” says the conductor Christoph Eschenbach. “The music has a Schumannesque rubato and a Schumannesque extravagance.”

“I said to him, 'This score reminds me so much of the Chopin F-minor Ballade,'” says the pianist Tzimon Barto. “And his eyes got really big, and he said, 'You found me out.'”

The score that Barto is talking about is Rihm's second piano concerto, which you can see on the Universal Music website, written out in Rihm's distinctive, clear, fountain-pen-wielding hand. If you're not into score reading, you can hear the piece at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, where Eschenbach, Barto and the National Symphony Orchestra will present its American premiere on Thursday night.

Written for and dedicated to Barto – who impressed the composer with his superb pianos, or quiet notes – the piece was co-commissioned by the NSO, the Salzburg Festival and the Mahler Youth Orchestra, and its world premiere last summer was an unexpected success.

The German-language press waxed rhapsodic. “We think we know the sound potential of the piano,” Christian Wildhagen wrote in the Frankfurter Allgemeine newspaper, “... and yet precisely in the withdrawal and dissection of the sound we hear (or, better, the composer found) new, previously undiscovered charms.”

Eschenbach prefers Rihm's own assessment. Rihm has written many works for Eschenbach over the years, and the conductor has performed his music in Schleswig-Holstein, in Dresden, in Philadelphia. “He said something I never heard him say before,” Eschenbach said, speaking in German by phone from a Philadelphia hotel room, and he quoted Rihm: “For me, this piece is really a lot of fun.”

It has taken Rihm a while to get to the point of “fun” – or, more precisely, to the point where audiences could recognize it. Born to a non-musical family in Karlsruhe, in the central part of Germany, where he still lives, Rihm got wide attention at an early age – he wrote his chamber opera “Jakob Lenz” when he was only 25 – but it wasn't always positive. “A fecal piece, best washed down with Schnapps” was allegedly one critic's assessment of an early work, cited in a documentary celebrating the composer's 60th birthday.

The critics have since come around, in part under the pressure of a steady barrage of work. Rihm is astonishingly prolific. His catalogue encompasses more than 400 pieces, from string quartets to concertos to several operas (most recently, “Dionysos”), which are notable for powerful expressionistic music and the composer's stated distaste for conventional narrative plots.

Rihm's appetite for stimuli matches his output. He is an omnivorous reader of everything from newspapers to James Joyce, is actively involved with the German visual art scene and is known among colleagues for being friendly, down to earth and happy to talk over a beer. He also takes an active role in the music world as a teacher, a lecturer, a member of juries and symposiums, and an author of several books.

What Rihm doesn't do is travel to the United States. He doesn't like to fly. Still, even if his name is not familiar to all American audiences, he has little to complain about. The New York Philharmonic has premiered a few of his works, including “Lichtes Spiel,” a concerto he wrote for the violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter, which she also recorded. The Cleveland Orchestra performed his quartet concerto “Dithyrambe” with the Emerson String Quartet. And this year, Rihm won the Grawemeyer Award, one of the world's largest composition prizes, administered by the University of Louisville, for “In-Schrift,” a 20-minute piece he wrote for the Berlin Philharmonic. This is pretty rarefied air.

“What's typical of Rihm's music is that it's atypical,” said Armin Köhler, the late musicologist and the head of the Donaueschingen festival. Eschenbach calls him “an artist of transformations,” a “Verwandlungskünstler,” meaning that Rihm writes in a shifting range of styles, with many quotes and evocations, but also referring in passing to his sequence of six orchestral pieces titled “Verwandlung” (“Transformation”), the first of which Eschenbach premiered in 2002.

There are jagged, aggressive pieces – “sometimes, he's written scores with fortissississimo markings, four F's,” Eschenbach says, “and the whole page will be covered.” But then there are delightful waltzes, or music of autumnal richness like the recent Brahms-inspired symphony “Nähe Fern” (“Near Far”), recently recorded by the Lucerne Symphony Orchestra.

Indeed, Rihm appears to have mellowed over time. The second piano concerto is, Barto says, deliberately Mozartean, at least in its gentle, chamber-music start, with lots of dialogue between soloist and orchestra. It is not, however, Mozartean in any thematic sense. The first of its two parts, Barto says, “is Zen-like, very fragmented; there are no themes to follow. ... You have to just live within each phrase.”

“It feels its way into your ear, wonderfully,” Eschenbach says.

“Rihm puts a lot of different markings in the score,” says Barto: “portati, long lines, accent, there's a lot of information.” But, Barto discovered, the composer was by no means dogmatic when his soloist suggested changes. “With Rihm, if you would take risks, he would love it,” Barto says. “After rehearsal, there were almost tears in his eyes, like a little child; he was just so happy.”